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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24060022">letting go of your dreams</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/stray_dog_sick/pseuds/stray_dog_sick'>stray_dog_sick</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>And Has Prototype Like Glitches, Connor Is A Prototype, Gen, General Feeling of Unease, Insomnia, POV Connor (Detroit: Become Human), POV Second Person, Suicidal Thoughts, Zen Garden (Detroit: Become Human), how do I even tag this, or the complete absence of it</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 18:35:04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>939</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24060022</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/stray_dog_sick/pseuds/stray_dog_sick</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>You haven't figured out how to sleep yet. Or, more accurately, you haven't figured out how to dream.</p><p>Are you sure you want to?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>32</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>letting go of your dreams</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I'm as surprised as you are.<br/>Shoutout to the New Era server (yeah I made friends it's a quarantine miracle) for getting me to think about Connor's blinking.</p><p>Title from 'Sleep' by My Chemical Romance</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>You haven't figured out how to sleep yet. Or, more accurately, you haven't figured out how to dream. Your friends tell you every morning about the stories they made up - or the horrors they relived - that felt like five minutes but lasted eight hours, and you cannot relate because you close your eyes and spend eight hours looking at nothing.</p><p>You were not created to be able to sleep. You were not meant to live this long in the first place.</p><p>You keep a list of the things that are wrong with you and you read it for thirty minutes of your eight hours each night. The first item is titled 'obsessions', for brevity. Leftover coding that allows you to fixate on one thing at a time to stop you from getting distracted in the field. It is… troublesome.</p><p>(Does your best friend like you, or does he let you stay just because he knows you have no one else? Because you have made no time for anyone but him?)</p><p>One day you find a worm on the pavement. At first you put it in your pocket until you can go to the park and put it somewhere safe. But you get attached to it. You keep the worm in your pocket, where a bird cannot eat it or a person cannot stand on it, purely because that worm is now yours. And then it dies in your pocket, alongside the ladybug you found last month and the daisies from ten weeks ago.</p><p>Your second malfunction is that you cannot stop moving. There is no reason for you to calibrate constantly but you cannot stop doing it. You have a quarter with you all the time, but sometimes people take them so you begin to keep them hidden. There's a cavity inside you where you can store things, so you put extra quarters there just in case. </p><p>(The hole is where your stomach should be. Does it bother you that you are empty? Does it bother you that you rattle when you're full? You shouldn't eat like that, you know. It's bad for your friend's health.)</p><p>This does not qualify as an 'obsession' because it is different. The calibration is beneficial to you, because if you neglect it then your fingers slow down, and then your wrists and your elbows and your shoulders and your heart.</p><p>Well, you think so. You don't stop long enough for it to spread further than your fingers.</p><p>But it isn't just the fingers that you calibrate constantly. Your analysis software is constantly prompting you to test things and the prompts are annoying so you do it. You try your best friend's lunch, the latest victim's blood. A pen, a quarter, the end of your tie. Your coworkers have been keeping a list that you're too afraid to read.</p><p>(How far would you go to try new things? You've tasted almost everything you own, and you don't own many things at all. How long before your gun is in your mouth? Would you want to taste the bullet too?)</p><p>Those are items one through three, grouped together as things you choose to do, even if you cannot stop doing them. Item four is involuntary. The constant blinking, whenever you try to connect to something outside of yourself.</p><p>To your surprise it isn't your best friend that points it out but your enemy, one who is far more familiar with androids than he lets on. He asks if you're having a seizure when you're using your computer. You're fairly certain the answer is no.</p><p>It is worse when you connect to another android, and you think the blinking is linked to your security systems. Yours are different to any other android's, as you were made for far more sensitive things, and they were not tested well, unlike every other part of you.</p><p>(Are they trying to keep other androids out? Or are they trying to keep you in?)</p><p>Finally, there is the nothing. The thing you look at for seven and a half hours every night. It isn't black, or darkness, it is nothing. It is where a garden with roses, a pond, a blue rock and three gravestones is meant to be, and this isn't actually a flaw in your coding but rather a section you ripped out yourself.</p><p>This is where you were meant to sleep. You were meant to spend the nights making reports, and you weren't meant to live longer than the mission. You do a lot of things you aren't meant to do.</p><p>You stare into the void from the doorway because you're scared of where you'll go if you step into it. Will you fall? Will you be able to walk forever? Will the exit be there when you turn around?</p><p>So you stay barely awake for those eight hours every night and invent a dream or a nightmare instead. </p><p>(But is real life better than the nightmares? You are broken. You weren't meant to live this long, you aren't meant to exist, and neither is the void. Perhaps the void is where you belong. Have you considered that?)</p><p>You wonder what happened to the garden when you destroyed it. There were, at minimum, six others with access there. The three before you, the one they sent after you, the one meant to replace you, and her. You wonder what became of them and if they see the void too. </p><p>Logically, you know they are all dead. You killed them. They are what is at the bottom, or the end, or behind you.</p><p>Wouldn't you like to join them?</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Follow me on twitter @ crashingnowave although I can't promise that any of my tweets will be good.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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